Great Lives

Michael Dobbs champions the life of Guy Burgess - journalist, diplomat and spy. Between 1935 and 1951, Guy Burgess worked for a Conservative MP, the BBC, MI6 and the Foreign Office. Brilliant, flamboyant and apparently shambolic, he also shot like an arrow to the heart of the Establishment and secretly and systematically betrayed its secrets to the KGB. Matthew Parris chairs as Michael explains wh...

When Philippa Langley and other members of the Richard III Society helped to discover the body of the king in a Leicester car park, Richard's life once again became a hotly contested debating point. Philippa joins Matthew Parris to defend Richard III as a Great Life, with expert witness and Richard biographer Annette Carson. Can the man who may have been responsible for the disappearance of the Pr...

Writer Roald Dahl is well known as the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr Fox and The BFG, but he was also fascinated by medical science. Professor Tom Solomon, who looked after him during his last illness, spent hours discussing medicine with Dahl. Tom talks to Matthew Parris about Dahl's life and work, through the prism of his forensic interest in the workings of the human...

Brian Eno has worked with David Bowie, David Byrne and U2 but his choice of Great Life is not a rock star but the sociologist Lord Young of Dartington. Michael Young wrote the Labour Party's 1945 election manifesto, researched slum clearance in the East End of London, set up the Consumers' Association, coined the word "meritocracy", co-founded the Open University and planned the colonisation of Ma...

Laura Bates, journalist and curator of the Everyday Sexism Project, explains to Matthew Parris why the 19th century children's author Louisa May Alcott has her vote for a Great Life. They are joined by Sarah Churchwell, Professor of American Literature at the University of East Anglia. Louisa May Alcott is best known as the writer of "Little Women", the story of four sisters growing up during the...

Matthew Parris – himself current holder of the House of Commons marathon record time – meets comedian Arthur Smith, who also turns out to have been a runner when he was younger. His choice for a Great Life is an athlete whom he has admired since his childhood. Emil Zátopek emerged onto the international stage in 1948 when he became a sensation at the Olympics in London, but it was his performance...

Matthew Parris discovers that Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at King’s College, London, has a surprising nomination for a Great Life. She's chosen Lucille Ball, the vivacious redhead, who in the 1950s and 1960s was one of the best-known and best-loved actresses on TV, both in the United States and here. What makes a professor of Greek and Roman writing such a great fan of a zany American actres...

Matthew Parris hears from Labour peer Lord Adonis why Joseph Bazalgette, the Victorian engineer, has his nomination as a Great Life. Bazalgette, the grandson of a French immigrant who made a fortune lending money to the Hanoverian royal family, is one of the most important of the great Victorian engineers. He not only built a sewage system for London which wiped out cholera in the city, he also bu...

Dame Stella Rimington, former director of MI5 and a celebrated crime writer herself, nominates for a Great Life that of Dorothy L Sayers. Sayers' first Lord Peter Wimsey novel was published in the 1920s, the Golden Age of crime fiction, and he is still very much with us, appearing often on BBC Radio 4 Extra. She went on to enjoy a huge popularity with her crime novels and then turned to writing Ch...

Singer-songwriter Labi Siffre discusses the life and work of Arthur Ransome. Siffre says that the Swallows and Amazons books taught him responsibility for his own actions and also a morality that has influenced and shaped him throughout his life. Series in which Matthew Parris invites his guests to nominate the person who they feel is a great life. Producer: Maggie Ayre First broadcast on BBC Radi...

Dr Tom Shakespeare is a lecturer at the Medical School in the University of East Anglia and prominent campaigner for the rights of the disabled. He explains to Matthew Parris why the life and work of the Italian left-wing revolutionary Antonio Gramsci means a great deal to him personally. They're joined in the studio by Professor Anne Sassoon. Producer: Christine Hal First broadcast on BBC Radio 4...

The life of Erwin Rommel, for a time Hitler's favourite general is nominated by Ray Mears. Matthew Parris hears why this German soldier was a "great life". They are also joined by Dr Niall Barr, Reader in Military History, Defence Studies Department at Kings College, London. Producer: Perminder Khatkar. First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2014.

Matthew Parris leads a discussion on Ida B. Wells the African American civil rights and women's rights activist who was a political trailblazer. She is the great life chosen by Baroness Oona King. Throughout her life, Wells was militant in her demands for equality and justice for black Americans and she encouraged the African American community to fight for positive change through their own effort...

Soul II Soul’s Jazzie B tells Matthew Parris why he nominates James Brown, the “Godfather of Soul”, for this series. Jazzie B, who was awarded a CBE for services to black British music, spent time latterly with James Brown and he became “like a big brother.” He shares personal reflections on Mr Brown’s life and legacy, with help from the music journalist Charles Shaar Murray. Producer: Maggie Ayre...

Writer Jonathan Meades nominates the English artist Edward Burra, who died in 1976, for "great life" status, arguing that he deserves to be better known. Burra painted sailors, drinkers and prostitutes in Toulon; jazz musicians in Harlem; surreal wartime pictures of soldiers in terrifying bird masks; and, in his later years, landscapes in which anthropomorphic and malevolent machines bite chunks o...

Michael Palin first came across his Great Life when he was studying for school exams, and his love of Ernest Hemingway has never gone away. He, along with expert Naomi Wood, tells Matthew Parris why this twentieth century legend is a Great Life. Producer: Perminder Khatkar.

Countryfile presenter John Craven proposes Victorian Engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, as a great life. He's joined by engineering historian Julia Elton and presenter Matthew Parris. And where better to discuss Brunel's achievements than by the harbour in Bristol in the shadow of his magnificent steam ship the SS Great Britain. But should his creator of great machines himself be considered a grea...

Jake Thackray hated being known as the north country Noel Coward, but at the height of his fame the description stuck. His songs are very British, but his influences were European - Georges Brassens and Jacques Brel. Nominating Jake Thackray is Isy Suttie (Dobby from TV's Peep Show and star of the A-Z of Mrs P). The expert witness is performer Fake Thackray aka John Watterson. Presented by Matthew...

Soprano Emma Kirkby discusses the life of English composer Henry Purcell with Matthew Parris. Despite dying at the age of 36, Purcell was arguably the first composer to become a national figure, as shown by his funeral at Westminster Abbey. Living through turbulent times, and through the reign of three monarchs, Purcell had to cope with shifting Catholic and Protestant regimes while producing a st...

Novelist and screenwriter, Deborah Moggach, nominates the Potteries writer Arnold Bennett, whose work she thinks has been wrongly overlooked, as he was considered as being too popular. Moggach believes that because he was a working writer who earned his living writing both serious and light fiction, he was not taken seriously until after his death in 1931, despite his books being hugely popular du...

Mathematician Marcus de Sautoy champions the blind Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. He is fascinated by the connection between the creator of 'The Library of Babel' and science - did Borges really understand notions of infinity and space? Biographer Jason Wilson adds colourful detail to the life of a great writer whom he insists was just being impish when it came to the weighty matters that h...

Sir Mark Walport, the government's Chief Scientific Advisor champions the life of Sir Hans Sloane, founder of the British Museum. Along with expert Marjorie Caygill they tell Matthew Parris why they think Sloane is the mother and father of all collectors. Producer : Perminder Khatkar.

Series of biographical discussions with Matthew Parris. Poet Simon Armitage nominates Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, who took his own life in 1980 at the age of 23. Curtis's fellow band member Peter Hook remembers his friend.

"Whenever I have too much to drink, I bang on about Dante ...." Sarah Vine makes a choice from the heart - the great Italian writer Dante Alighieri, father of the Italian language and author of the Divine Comedy. "I'm not an expert," she says, "mine is more of a romantic infatuation." As well as the outspoken Daily Mail columnist, Matthew Parris is joined by Claire Honess, professor of Italian stu...

Solo percussionist, Evelyn Glennie explains her admiration for cellist, Jacqueline Du Pre. Presented by Matthew Parris. With music writer and broadcaster, Stephen Johnson. Producer: Perminder Khatkar First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in April 2014.